When first party app is very bad and third party app is dead
dons wizard hat
You think you're joking, but peer-to-peer, capability-based distribution is the future of web design. Federation protocols (like ActivityPub, on which run Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, et. al.) are a big step up from single points of centralization like Reddit and Twitter, but most implementations are still fundamentally client/server architectures which give server owners power over users. Some of the people who invented ActivityPub have already moved into a new phase of distributed systems architecture. "Second-party" is not a terrible way to think about it.
WASM (WebAssembly) is one of the key technical breakthroughs that will facilitate much richer distribution; it allows many languages to run natively (fast) in common browsers. No longer will we all be necessarily bound to the abomination that is Javascript. With WASM, backend guys like me can run our fancy languages/databases right on your browser, building stronger meshes of user computers acting like lighter versions of federated servers. Together with Free Software ─ the legal right to share and change code ─ this technology represents the democratization of the Internet.
So why hasn't this glorious revolution happened already? Well, WASM support is still not ubiquitous and there are still serious architectural challenges whose solutions are very much in progress. Security is a big one. With centralized infrastructure, the most efficient way to handle security is a concept called ACLs (Access Control Lists), which are like firewalls ─ lists of rules for who can do what. With ACLs, each node has all the tools and a copy of the rules. This does not work when you want powerful nodes to run independently under the control of complete strangers.
The way forward is Capability-Based Security, which includes three big ideas:
- Each node has only the tools that it needs.
- When a node needs a new tool, it has to ask its neighbors to borrow it.
- Just because a node is borrowing a tool doesn't mean it can share it with others.
Cryptographically-enhanced capability-based security makes the computational power of individual nodes irrelevant to their role in the larger system. WASM contains an implementation of this idea ─ it's called WASI (WASM System Interface) ─ but there are different approaches with different tradeoffs. The one I'm studying right now is called Spritely Goblins, developed by some of the people who invented ActivityPub. You can read more at https://spritely.institute.
You're completely missing the more useful point. The right says "woke and political," implicitly referencing the complex change I described above. The left quotes the right saying "woke and political" as an implicit dismissal of civil rights, diversity, representation, etc. Both of these lazy-ass anachronisms suck big huge elephant dicks and ruin the political discourse in the media.
I'm not defending the straw man in this screenshot of a tweet, but this is a bad comparison. Roddenberry created a world in which the ideas of equality, freedom, diplomacy, and justice could be explored organically. He shifted the underlying economic motivations for the existence of political systems. He fought constantly with the studio system and his own writers to bring about a revolutionary vision of the future.
Since Roddenberry's death, Star Trek: The Franchise has been slowly oscillating downwards: away from a universe whose observation reveals the objective value of virtue into one in which virtue is paid lip service at the cost of strong "physics" -- that is, the sense of a coherent universe. Star Trek is now a product researched, marketed, designed, produced, tested, distributed, and defended by committee. Where once we had revolutionary subversions of what was allowed on television, we now find performative affirmations of popular lifestyle. If you have to compare yourself to 90's broadcast television in order to feel revolutionary, you're not.
The use of "woke" and "political" in this hypercontextualist style is so vague as to border on non-expression. Reacting to a reaction to a reaction to a reaction to a form of expression in which my reply wouldn't be allowed due to a character limit is not critical thinking. We can do better than this. Roddenberry already did.
I could park a truck on one of those onion slices.
For a split second I was like, "What is wrong with your cats?!" Thanks for sharing, friend.
Well pardon me if I politically digress in the LOTR memes group, but it might get worse before it gets better. Encryption, for example, is an inherent existential threat to authoritarianism, and there is global bipartisan support for law which would (or already did) criminalize it under broad or subjective circumstances. The exponential growth of industry puts massive economic strain on political systems, and those explicitly designed to be procedurally overthrown (via representative democracy, for example) may adapt by creating unconstitutional political tokens such as, just off the top of my head, internal revenue systems designed to destabilize opponents' campaign finance systems, aggressive zoning practices intended to control demography, and deficit spending courtesy of international geopolitical entanglement backed by informally declared unconventional warfare.
It's irrational to refrain from criticizing the left wing, which, in the US, supports all of the above practices when the White House is blue. So does the right when it's red. We have to get past this shit. Industry exacerbates otherwise manageable resource asymmetry. We need to put our cultural differences on hold while we purge the bias and clientelism from our internal revenue systems. Only then will this pressure to enforce subjective values subside to a level where it can be managed by individuals and their technology.